• Jimmy Carter, the 39th U.S. president, died at age 100 in his hometown in Plains, Georgia.
• The former president left a long legacy working in public health.
• In recent years, Carter has had multiple health issues, including being diagnosed with metastatic melanoma and a fractured pelvis.

Former United States President Jimmy Carter died on December 29 at age 100 in his hometown of Plains, Georgia. Carter was the 39th president and the only former president to reach centenarian status. He leaves a long legacy in global health and infectious disease that has changed the world for the better.

In a statement issued by the White House, President Joe Biden called Carter a “dear friend’ who was “a man of great character and courage, hope and optimism.”

“With his compassion and moral clarity, he worked to eradicate disease, forge peace, advance civil rights and human rights, promote free and fair elections, house the homeless, and always advocate for the least among us.” President Biden said. “He saved, lifted, and changed the lives of people all across the globe.”

Carter has been in in-home hospice since February 2023, following a series of hospitalizations.

Health issues have plagued Carter in the past decade. In 2015, he was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma that had spread to his liver and brain. But he subsequently beat the diagnosis and was declared cancer-free.

In 2019, Carter suffered a series of falls around the time of his birthday in October, with one resulting in a black eye, stitches, and a fractured pelvis. He again went on to make a full recovery.

Carter’s wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter, died in November 2023, at age 96. The Carters were the longest-married presidential couple in the U.S. history.

Jimmy Carter’s public health legacy

The former President’s charitable work since his defeat by Reagan in 1980 was legendary. He worked with organizations, including Habitat for Humanity and his namesake, the Carter Center.

Throughout the past decades, Carter has also worked diligently in global health to work toward the eradication of devastating diseases around the world. He has become a patron in the world of neglected tropical diseases, a group of conditions with far-reaching health and economic outcomes. However, because they are found predominantly in impoverished areas, these diseases, which include Chagas, dengue, guinea-worm disease, and river blindness (onchocerciasis), were often not well studied.

Peter J. Hotez, MD, PhD, Co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, has worked with Carter over the years. In 2006, the two worked on a panel that helped to introduce the term “neglected tropical diseases” into the global health lexicon.

“To have him be out in front, talking about the importance of diseases that previously most people didn’t care about was a tremendous boost to our whole field of neglected tropical diseases,” he told Healthline.

William Schaffner, MD, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical School, echoed those sentiments, saying that Carter Center cast a light on “the forgotten problems of forgotten people.”

“These tropical diseases are outside of our daily purview, outside of our daily experience here in the developed world, but they cause untold misery for people around the world,” he told Healthline.

Fight against neglected tropical diseases

Today, the Carter Center continues its fight against neglected tropical diseases with the ultimate goal of eradication in mind. The six at the top of the center’s list are:

• Guinea worm disease
• River blindness (onchocerciasis)
• Trachoma
• Lymphatic filariasis (elephantiasis)
• Schistosomiasis
• Malaria

Neglected tropical diseases are historically hard to treat for many reasons. They most often occur in impoverished regions and countries, often in remote areas. They also tend to be debilitating but not deadly, which can put them lower on the list when it comes to money and resources for treatment, according to Hotez.

“When you’re trying to compete for resources with people who study certain diseases like AIDS or tuberculosis, getting people to care about these chronic and debilitating infections is not always easy,” he said.

River blindness (onchocerciasis) is caused by a parasitic worm that is transmitted to humans through the repeated bites of infected blackflies. The worm larvae migrate within the body to the skin, eyes, and organs, leading to inflammation, lesions, and blindness.

“You can see pictures of a village where there’s a tiny little child, a 5-year-old with a long stick, and the stick is extended behind him, and the other end is held by an adult, and he is leading that adult around the village because the adult cannot see,” said Schaffner.

Schistosomiasis is caused when a parasitic blood fluke infects humans. Freshwater snails serve as an intermediary host for the larvae before releasing them into bodies of water; from there, the larvae are capable of penetrating human skin.

“It is the second most important parasitic disease in the world in terms of its extent and its morbidity,” Ronald Blanton, MD, Chair of Tropical Medicine at Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, told Healthline.

Schistosomiasis causes liver and intestinal damage, resulting in bloody urine and stool, among other serious health problems.

Carter’s tireless effort to eradicate Guinea worm disease

Of all the neglected tropical diseases that he has worked to eradicate, the one that Carter’s name is most closely associated with is guinea worm disease. Caused by larvae of the parasite Dracunculus medinensis, most often from drinking from a contaminated water source.

Inside the body, a female larvae will grow, sometimes up to over three feet in length, before emerging through a blister in the skin to expel its own larvae into water.

Carter worked tirelessly to eradicate the disease. In the mid-1980s, the estimated number of guinea worm disease cases stood at 3.5 million. By 1989, that number fell to under one million. According to the most recent reports by the WHO and CDC from 2022, there were only 13 known cases in the world.

In 1995, during the Second Sudanese Civil War, Carter helped to broker the longest humanitarian cease-fire in history to combat the disease. The six-month “guinea worm ceasefire,” as it came to be known, gave health workers the opportunity to distribute some 200,000 water filters capable of filtering out guinea worm larvae and provide treatment and education about the disease.

“I would like to see Guinea worm completely eradicated before I die,” Carter said at a press conference in 2015, “I’d like for the last Guinea worm to die before I do.”

Jimmy Carter’s global health legacy

Carter’s legacy continues to live on.

“The infectious disease world, and particularly those who are interested in global medicine and tropical diseases think of Jimmy Carter in a very, and I mean this seriously, reverential fashion,” said Schaffner.

Hotez told Healthline that Carter’s work and legacy are those of “a life well lived.”

Hotez prefers, however, to remember Carter as an American who was humble and forever in touch with his roots:

“Before I lived in the South, when we were standing in the breakfast buffet line together, I didn’t know what cheesy grits were, so he gave me a lesson in how to make cheesy grits. I don’t think of President Carter, I think of cheesy grits.”